Saturday, December 12, 2009

Backup software for Domino R8.5 servers

Yesterday I started working with a customer is having all sorts of troubles getting his integrated backup s/w to work with newly upgraded (R8.02 to R8.5) virtualized Domino servers. Now I'm not going to mention the backup s/w name at this point since negotiations are still underway with the vendor about what his documentation meant when he said it " ... supports Domino R8.x ", but I am interested in what experience other people have with backing up R8.5 Domino servers.

On an AS/400 I wrote my own script that would stop Domino, back it up, then start it. It worked flawlessly but obviously the server had to go down. I had nothing but problems with BackupExec way back when we were running R5. It would back up everything just fine, I just couldn't recover anything. I switched over to Tivoli Storage Manager and it worked perfectly.

We are using EMC Legato Networker with Domino 8.5.1. See http://www.emc.com/products/detail/software/networker-module-ibm-lotus-notes-domino.htmIn the near future, we will use TSM (for political reasons). Legato still does a good job. It's not a a solution on it's own: You need a EMC legato backup server to integrate the Domino backup solution as a module with the central backup system.